Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Avoided Moments

Years ago I heard Richard Peck say, “You learn the most from
the experience you would have avoided if you could.” In the same keynote
address I also heard him say, “You are only as good as your opening line”. Although
the second quote is one of my favorite, that will have to be a discussion for
another post.

Think about the experience you would have avoided if you
could. We all have things in our lives that fit this description. What emotion
is connected to that experience? What would you have done to avoid it if we had
known it was coming? Who would you be now, if that experience had not existed
in your life?

Your character needs an experience like that. They need to
be faced with something so terrible or terrifying that they would have avoided
it at all cost. Maybe they are trying to avoid it. Perhaps they know, and
understand what is at stake.

How do we help our character find that experience? Is it
something we have experienced in our own lives and know about? Not always.
Maybe you are experiencing this situation for the first time through your
character and are trying to understand the emotions connected to this
experience.

I’ve been trying to create a character that is dominating
and has an entire community under his thumb. He would have to be so controlling
and scary that nobody dared cross him. The problem is, fortunately, I’ve never
experienced such dominion. However, as I’ve struggled with this character, I
realized that there are moments in my life when I was terrified of a situation
or person. Especially as a child. I’ve examined those experiences and the
emotions that go with them and tried to transfer them to this fictional
character that plays such a critical role in my novel.

Transferring these emotions does not mean transferring the
exact experience. But the emotions can help you to create this character and
give him real traits. You will better know how the characters around him will
react as you pull from these emotions and then interview your characters. All
your characters. How are they feeling? What are they thinking? How will that
cause them to react to the particular rough spot where you have led them? Also posted at:http://utahchildrenswriters.blogspot.com/

1 comment:

Hi Melanie! I saw this post on InkPageant. I didn't know you had a blog!What a great post--so true. I think sometimes it's fun to write the good happy moments when things are light hearted and funny and going good for our characters, but it's those moments that they wish would never happen or never had happened that really make our characters real.